Saturday, August 25, 2012

Only
1 out of 50 points listed is actually about building a
product: Its listed under step 7, which is: “Add the backend code to
make the site work”.
The
rest is mostly cruft and admin type work that an outsourced
worker could do. No doubt its important, but 98% compared to 2%?

The article comes across as a guide to building an
over-hyped marketing vehicle, solely to receive funding, rather
than actually building something useful that people want to use. There’s no mention of innovation or of making
people’s lives easier. This is Startups For Dummies.

Full respect to Steve Blank (a 34 year
veteran of Silicon Valley) and his views, but in my view, this
particular article has a glaring weakness.

Some further reading on the topic:

This Starting a Startup article by Paul Graham is simple but contains three great points he says you should
focus on:

Thursday, August 23, 2012

TCP is one of the core protocols of the Internet and is a bi-directional, client/server protocol. In .NET you can use the TcpListener Class for the server component, which provides simple methods that listen for and accept incoming connection requests from clients. You can use the TcpClient Class for the client component, which provides client connections to TCP server components; it provides simple methods for connecting, sending, and receiving stream-based data over the network.

Here's a standalone C# 4.0 app that demonstrates how to setup a TCP/IP sockets based client and server in .NET. It uses a command line option to determine whether to run the client or server. There's no external files or libraries needed, just the standard ones you get with a C# 4.0 console project. I've tested it with Visual Studio 2010 in Windows, and it will also work unchanged with Mono.

To run the server, from the command prompt... SocketsTest -server

To run the client, from another command prompt ... SocketsTest -client

Sunday, August 12, 2012

Amazon Locker is a new delivery option offered by Amazon which provides secure, self-service pick-up stations located in a select number of cities in the US and UK. Once your package is delivered to the Amazon Locker, you receive an e-mail informing you that your package is available for pick-up.

This Amazon service came about 1 year after a Canadian startup called BufferBox started offering a similar secure dropbox service. BufferBox has lockers installed in two locations in Waterloo, one at the university and another a nearby corporate office. The company is nearing a launch in Toronto and plans to roll out lockers across Canadian and U.S. cities.

But back in 2000, another Canadian company launched a similar service. On July 24, 2000, Canadian property management company Oxford Properties Group launched a startup called EMPORI.COM. Customers could order products from affiliated online retailers via
Empori.com, which were then delivered on the same or next day to a secure depot containing lockers. The original depot was located in an office building in Toronto (Royal Bank Plaza) and over the course of a year this expanded to three more sites around Toronto. Oxford Properties Group saw this as a way for their commercial real estate customers to get additional value out of their prime inner city locations. The idea was that city workers would order products online and then, after receiving an email notification with the locker location and locker combination, would pick their order up at the end of the day, on their way home from work. A host of a products from 31 vendors were offered, from books to running shoes to groceries and even liquor.

The upmarket secure lockers offered by Empori

From the launch press release: "Empori.com is the one-of-a-kind retail solution to those barriers that discourage people from purchasing online. Our delivery system addresses the online shopping fulfillment problem."

Less than 1 year later, on July 17, 2001,
Empori.com closed after a $5 million loss. The blame was initially placed on the general business environment which included the bursting of the dot com bubble: "With recent changes in the dot-com environment, [Empori] was unable to find another strategic and financial partner to support further development of the business-to-consumer business,"

As the dust settled it looked like the single biggest factor in Empori’s failure was its inability to secure a critical mass of online retailers. They tried to do too much - secure depots for pick-up was only one piece of their ambitious plan - they were also reselling goods via their website, which was the sole point of contact to access their secure depots. In effect they were trying to launch a new online retail site, coming off a base of zero customers, while in the general dot com gloom of 2000/01. Maybe what they should have done is to focus solely on their unique selling point - the secure depot - and offered it as a service, available to any online retailer, much as BufferBox is doing today.

The business burned $5 million in one year before closing

As of today, the Empori.com domain name is offered for outright sale for €3540 ($4351) by a European domain reseller. "Empori" is Italian for "Stores".